Page 133 of Angels Are Falling

She crossed the kitchen and kissed me.

I had modeled ten thousand versions of this woman’s next move, and this one existed only in the file marked optimistic. She closed the gap between us. Her hands came up to my jaw—careful of the split lip—and for half a second, I kept my own hands at my sides.

Then, as if remembering, my hands snaked around her waist. She wasn’t putting on a ruse. I had watched her for years. I knew when she was faking her emotions and Amelie wasn’t faking a thing right now.

“Kai,” she said against my mouth. She pulled back far enough to look at me, and her eyes were wet and steady at the same time. “I love you.”

My hands stayed still. I had dreamt of hearing her say those words. I had rehearsed everything about this moment, but the believing. It turned out belief required no rehearsal when you’d spent years engineering every road that could lead her mouth to that sentence.

“I love you.” Not too. Mine wasn’t an echo, it held seniority. “But love seems mild for what I feel for you, Princess. It’s greater than love.”

Her breath caught. I kept going.

“And I need you to understand exactly what you just handed me when you said those words. It means it’s over between you and him. I only agreed to share you because a fraction of you was worth more than the entirety of anyone else. I will never share you again. Not with him, not even with his memories. You don’t go back to him. You don’t think about him. Ever. It’s over for good, and I’m not asking. I’m telling you what’s already true.”

“It’s over.” She pulled back to look at me. There was a wet streak down one side of her face, and she didn’t wipe it away.

“If I see him around you again, I swear⁠—”

She put her hands over my mouth, and repeated, “It’s over.”

The rest of my sentence died behind her fingers, which was for the best. She wouldn’t have liked the ending.

She looked me in the eye. “It’s only ever going to be you, Kai. I promise.”

She put her arms around me and set her cheek against my chest, over the heartbeat that has belonged to her since before she knew my name and stayed there.

“I’m sorry about your parents,” she said quietly into my shirt.

My arms tightened.

“Stefan said the crash—” She stopped.

“It really was an accident,” I said. “No one was at fault.”

A breath of relief. “I believe you.”

“I never told you because I had no idea how to explain the coincidence.”

She nodded against my chest. I rested my chin on her hair, not admitting the worst of it.

My parents knew there was a woman—I’d been acting different for years—and finally took it upon themselves to investigate the matter. My assistant had tipped them off about the unhealthy number of hours I spent at a college campus. They had called me, confronted me about my self-destructive behavior over a woman who didn’t know of my existence. They were concerned, like any loving parents, which had led them inside a car in bad weather.

They died trying to bring me back to sanity. In doing so, they also brought Amelie to me. They might not have known it at the time, even I didn’t know it. Sleek ice made their car veer off, running Stefan’s parents’ car off the road. Their deaths caused Stefan to become responsible for his siblings, which led to his resentment, and I finally saw an opening after years of trying to break through. I took it without hesitating. Grief made some men gentle. It made me thorough.

And that was the entire fucked-up truth. As much as I hated admitting it, they died to bring Amelie to me.

And that sacrifice had never been as meaningful as she spoke the words I had waited years to hear. “I love you, Kai,” she said with her ear over my heart. “I believe you.”

We stayed like that, her breathing evening out against me, my hand moving over her hair with the carefulness of a man who had finally caught the thing he was chasing and was worried about it slipping through his fingers.

Outside, headlights swung across the window—Mrs. Bea’s sensible sedan, and two doors opening before it had fully stopped, and the sound of the boys arguing about whose fault something was. Amelie wiped her face with the back of her wrist and went to let them in.

And I did not tell her the conclusion I came to, the winter my parents died. When I called myself a terrible son, sitting in the snow outside a gold-lit garden, I was being generous. My mother and father died driving toward me. Because their son had lost his mind over the one thing in this world he couldn’t buy. They paid for this woman with their lives, and I was raised—by those exact people—never to waste an inheritance.

Chapter

Forty